Basheera Khan is a South African technology journalist and blogger based in London. She is a Contributing Editor to TechCrunch Europe and blogs about social media and other geeky things for The Daily Telegraph.
Basheera began her career in technology publishing as a staff reporter for ITWeb and Brainstorm in Johannesburg. She moved to the UK in 2001, somehow ending up in Swansea. After a stint editing itwales.com for Swansea University’s computer science department, she launched Wales’ first and only technology news publication, Ping Wales (2004-2007, RIP). She has appeared on ITV Wales 6pm news commenting on new media, and has in the past blogged for Social Media Influence.
Basheera has been a frequent contributor to the Welsh business press, and has lectured in online journalism at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism and Glamorgan University’s School of Creative & Cultural Industries. She is a regular speaker at events organised by the non-profit company bloc, which focus on creative technology in Wales.
You’d think that with the futuristic and gravity defying creations they spawn, architects would be leading the vanguard of efficient working practices. It turns out they’re still stuck in the 90s, where sharing files and collaborating with partners and clients is done via CD and bike messenger, or – shock! horror! – even printouts sent by post. Tech startup Woobius is trying to… → Read More
ITV.com is leaping aboard the social media bandwagon to encourage realtime interaction around this afternoon’s FA Cup final between Everton and Chelsea FCs. The broadcaster has integrated updates from Twitter and our old friends AudioBoo in an FA Cup Buzz microsite. The site uses Twitterfall to keep track of tweets about the match, with an added enhancement; a tool developed by thruSITES… → Read More
UK startup Imagini has launched the private beta version of its VisualDNA Shops widget to help monetise blogs and websites through a unique take on affiliate sales. The widget adds personalised product recommendations to any site, and immediately starts generating detailed demographic, psychographic and behavioural analytics of its visitors. It does this using the company’s VisualDNA… → Read More
So, the dust has settled and we can congratulate start-up photo notecard printing company Touchnote on getting their mobile app out the door in a mere 5 weeks, i.e. just in time to have it included in the Ovi launch FAIL. Thanks to the massive teething problems the Ovi store’s experienced today, you can’t yet find Touchnote for Mobile if you search for it, but we’re told this… → Read More
Mobile content provider AQA 63336 (whose name makes me think of that new emergency services number) has launched AQA2U, a commercial micro-publishing platform which lets UK users micro-blog for money. It works like this: you sign up as a publisher via the AQA website. Once approved, you set up topics ending in 2U which your ‘fans and followers’ subscribe to by texting that topic to… → Read More
Picli.com, the photo sharing community site which relaunched in March, has just launched a free service to allow users to share photos and video with their Twitter friends. Of course, it’s called Twicli. The service can handle photos, videos, sets and offers a sweet little user experience touch which ‘synchronises’ with the colours and background of your Twitter account –… → Read More
Now here’s something amazing. French telecoms startup Manifone has launched a service that lets you call Skype contacts directly, from any fixed line or mobile phone, with no Skype account, additional software, PC or handset required. They claim their Mani-Sky VoIP service is a first in the telecommunications industry, and by golly, I think they may be right. Mani-Sky assigns alias telephone… → Read More
Yahoo’s Open Hack Day London happened this weekend, encouraging the European developer community to get down and dirty with the company’s open strategy platforms. Making use of Yahoo’s now considerable amount of APIs (beautifully rendered in Tube map stylee), the 250+ developers gathered at Congress Centre in Covent Garden and hacked away on a range of projects that ran the gamut… → Read More
Online collaboration startup Huddle.net has scored a win with the launch of Huddle Workspaces on Ning Apps, a new suite of social networking applications that Ning network creators will be able to deploy across their networks. A few pre-selected network creators have access to a private beta of Ning Apps as of today, and it’ll be available to everyone on Ning by the end of the month. Ning… → Read More
It looks like the guys at Spoonfed have stolen a march on Time Out and other event guides with the release of their iPhone app, the Spoonfed Events Radar, available free from the App Store as of today. The launch is the first step of the startup company’s mobile strategy which extends the Spoonfed events listings database to the mobile platform, making it easier for Londoners to find… → Read More
Live Blog: Think through the business model early on – startups often make the mistake that this means tinkering with a spreadsheet for months.
There are lots of ways to sell valuable services – find the ‘best fit’ for your company and your customers. How and what are they willing to pay for the services?
It’s all about the details – the devil is in the details and the execution. Talk to other… → Read More
Bankrobber – To VC or not to VC? That Is The Question
Fred Destin, Atlas Ventures
Fred Destin joined Atlas in 2004 and is a Partner in the technology group. He focuses on software and technology-enabled services and digital media infrastructure and applications. He previously co-managed OM Technology Investments, an IP Services and FinTech focused fund backed by Allianz/Dresdner. He served on the… → Read More
Send me an Angel – Funding and How to Handle Angels Nick says: Finding an angel is like finding an invisible man – they don’t tend to broadcast their presence but they network to find likely opportunities, and they also know each other. They’ll group together by region so they can do larger investments as well. There are plenty of companies out there who say they can get… → Read More
American Idiot – Launching Your Startup In the US – when you’re actually in Scotland LesleyEccles, co-founder of Hubdub, a news prediction game drops the 411 on how to successfully launch a startup in a region you don’t actually live in. The site launched in November last year and got about 500k web users, mentioned across about 100 media outlets, considered to be quite a… → Read More
Ian Hogarth, co-founder and CEO of music startup Songkick.com reckons the best way for a startup to focus on what they do best is to find third party tech tools to do the non-core heavy lifting. To this end, he’s started a wiki collection of startup tools, contributed by Songkick, Playfire, TinyCoupon, Habit Industries, Poll Everywhere, GroupSpaces and Huddle. “One of the most… → Read More
Leisa Reichelt, freelance user experience consultant, talking about what startups most often get wrong about UX and what they should do about it. Step 1: Find your audience. It’s amazing how few startups actually know who their audience is. There is no such thing as ‘the general public. Step 2: Know your audience This is the step that a lot of companies just seem to ignore. Once you… → Read More
Balancing Tech Culture: Getting more women involved in tech startups A panel discussion featuring Cate Sevilla, founding editor at BitchBuzz Sophie Cox, co-founder of Worldeka.com Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson, head of marketing communications at Huddle.net Leisa Reichelt, User experience consultant at Disambiguity Nacera Benfedda, director of product, Viadeo Video: LIVE BLOG: Cate asks, does the… → Read More
Hardly anyone knows how to spell it, fewer people still know how to do it. But thanks to Joe Stepniewski, co-founder of Skimlinks, you too can learn the secrets of the dark arts of monetisation. Basically, stick to affiliate marketing rather than advertising; Joe showed some stats demonstrating CPM return slowdown; its dropped consistently over the last few quarters and doesn’t guarantee… → Read More
Andy McLoughlin, CEO at Huddle talks really fast about hiring a team of peers – illustrating the point with a slide full of pictures of Piers Morgan. Oh, the trauma. Other than that, this is great advice. When recruiting people, meeting the perfect candidate is like falling in love. You’ve got to be able to imagine yourself spending all day, every day with that person. He also suggests… → Read More
Inma Martinez at Stradbroke Advisors is one of the world’s leading digital media strategists, described by FORTUNE and TIME as one of Europe’s top talents in Human Factors and Social Engagement through technology. Her advice for European startups: move to the US. The US market is where the ripple effect of the internet takes place. It can be hard, but you should still try, despite sticking out… → Read More
The guys at TweetMinster.co.uk have launched a free Adobe AIR Twitter client that lets users track, follow and engage around UK politics in real time. Still in beta, the TweetMinster Wire comes with preset groups to allow people to follow and access the Twitter streams of MPs, prospective parliamentary candidates, all major parties, parliament and government departments and those coming out of 10… → Read More
7Digital.com is on something of a hot streak; following its partnerships with Spotify and Songbird, the site has partnered with AOL to offer music download integration to Winamp users in 10 European regions, through the ‘Now Playing’ menu. The service is available across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, Portugal and Ireland. Winamp has 77 million users worldwide. 7digital has… → Read More
BraveNewTalent.com, one of the slew of social media enabled graduate recruitment sites to launch this year, has had £102k in finance from RBS under the government’s new Enterprise Finance Guarantee (EFG) scheme that encourages business growth and staff expansion. Like many social media takes on traditional approaches, BraveNewTalent.com flips the recruitment model, allowing graduate job… → Read More
Meet MuZoid. She’s a very clever bot created by some even cleverer people; she’s all about killing all humans helping you find more music to love, CDs to buy and gigs to attend, and she does it all through Twitter, naturally. Twitter users sending a tweet with the name of a band or artist to MuZoid receive a reply in less than 2.5 seconds with a link to a bespoke webpage containing gig… → Read More
SellaBand, the social music startup which encourages music fans to invest in up-and-coming artists, is expanding its offering to the US in a deal with Amazon.com company CreateSpace. The deal relies on CreateSpace’s Disc on Demand service, an inventory-free solution in which discs are manufactured only after a customer places an order. It’s an elegant and affordable solution to a… → Read More
The mobile content service which Yahoo previewed at Mobile World Congress in February launched today across eight countries, available both as an iPhone app and a mobile content site optimised for 300 devices ‘with HTML-enabled mobile browsers’. Yahoo Mobile, available at http://new.m.yahoo.com or from the App Store, combines what you’d expect from Yahoo’s services —… → Read More
Picli.com, a photo sharing community site launched in private beta in March 2007, has relaunched with a slew of new features and a more clearly defined business model. Two years seems like a long time for a site to be in beta, and Picli’s developer/designer founder duo of Sam Street and Sean Miller acknowledge this in the FAQ, referring to 2008 as ‘the dark age’ in which, well… → Read More
Here’s something from the department of Quelle Surprise: Bango (AIM: BGO) reckons the iPhone lags behind the top 20 mobile handsets most used in browsing and buying on the mobile web. The Bango Top 20 handset list, based on Bango’s February statistics, puts the Nokia 3110c on top, followed by the Samsung M800 in 2nd and the Nokia 6300 in 3rd place. On the whole, smartphones account for… → Read More
Congratulations to Dan Hon and his team at Six To Start, one of the surprise winners at this year’s SXSW Interactive Web Awards, not least to themselves, apparently. The alternative reality gaming startup based in London won both the Experimental and Best of Show awards for its digital story-telling mashup with Penguin Books, We Tell Stories, which, at almost exactly this time last year, was… → Read More
Social networking site Bebo has made the leap into Europe, teaming with local media partners to gain a foothold in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands — markets in which Facebook, MySpace and Netlog are already active players. AOL’s People Networks division announced yesterday that the site will use IP-based geo-targetting to provide services in the user’s first… → Read More
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